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Old ways to win back time

A recent post of ours on LinkedIn received some welcome ‘likes’ in response. It was good to know that it was well received. The post referred to an article recently published which was co-written with Jamie Stentaford from the Affinity Sutton Group. It was called ‘Management Accountants as catalysts for change’. Those who liked the piece were almost

Being confident with confidence

We can be more confident We get to meet a lot of Finance people. We have the privilege of teaching Finance Teams within the various Mastercourse Programmes that we present, and of working closely with them as part of our day job as Consultants. Based upon the conversations that we have had along the way,

Big data and predicting the vulnerable

Using big data methods we have been able to predict which social housing occupants are at greatest risk of abandoning their home without warning. The numbers are very small but their impact is big – court action to secure the property, unpaid rent to chase. We started by flagging those who had probably already

Charity Trustees – now is your finest hour

Scary questions Back in January of this year the journal ‘Third Sector’ posted an article containing an uncomfortable suggestion. It was that Charities in the UK should ask themselves a series of searching questions in order to test their fitness to survive. The sort of questions that the Author had in mind included ‘are you

To get the best out of big data – you need to understand your costs

Big data analytics can help to predict how costs in an organisation are likely to change. It’s not hard to see how. If big data predicts that a certain number of customers will shift, say, from one sales channel to another, if we know the number and we know the probability of it happening, we

Predicting the chaotic

We may have achieved a small but significant first. We have used big data methods to predict which social housing occupants are at greatest risk of abandoning their home without warning. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does there can be months of work ahead. There may be a trail of unpaid rent, an

Putting the intelligence into BI

Identifying cost reductions in an organisation is never easy. But happy days !! – an initiative to do just that has just concluded successfully, with all cost reduction targets agreed in full. Such a good feeling. And this was in a place that seeks consensus at every step within a management decision. No top down

Limits and possibilities – making strategic plans come alive

It’s alive! This week, a strategic plan came alive. These are traditionally documents which describe a single path to success accompanied by some financial projections, a couple of alternative scenarios, and a set of risks, conditions, assumptions and caveats. It’s not often that plans can be said to ‘jump into life’. But this did because

Big data, social housing, and Kaggle.com

Organisations that need help in answering questions involving big data can submit them to Kaggle.com. This site matches organisations that have a problem to solve with data scientists who are looking for a challenge. At the time of writing the problems on offer ranged from the ability to read the political landscape in Hilary Clinton’s

Big data – Social Housing can follow where Amazon has led the way

Big can be beautiful Scale does matter with data. The more of it you have the more value you get from it. But, as any data scientist will point out, you must start small, understand the data fully and keep it as simple as possible. Imagine that you are selling films on-line. The data you